Minister of Earth Sciences
Kirin Rijiju
Reportedly upset by
French IT company Atos
. The reason is said to be a delay in the delivery of two supercomputers by the French company
Indian weather forecasting institutes
. According to a report by news agency PTI
Ministry of Earth Sciences
French company Eviden, a subsidiary of Atos Group, ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million last year to boost the computing capabilities of its two institutions – the National Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (NCMRWF) and the National Weather Forecast Agency.
Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology
(ETM).
“I am more upset because the target we set was December. The Union Cabinet has already approved the purchase of the supercomputer. We have only four petaflops. We want to install up to 18 petaflops,” Rijiju told PTI in a video interview.
He said that the French company faced some financial problems and wanted the government to pay the amounts to its subsidiary.
The minister says the delay causes him “anxiety”
Rijiju said the delay caused him a lot of anxiety as the company was over schedule. “But I think we will resolve the matter soon,” he added, adding that the government wanted to be “very correct in its position from a legal standpoint.”
“We are ready to release the money because we want the machine immediately. The only problem is that the amount is not small. So if we pay now, or if the company goes bankrupt or something happens, who will bail us out,” the minister said.
Rijiju also added that the government is taking some steps to speed up the delivery of the supercomputer but did not go into details. “But I hope that the French government will also intervene because we have a good understanding and a very good relationship with the French government.
“Since this is high-cost equipment, we want to make sure that the deal is done duly and correctly,” he said.
“From the outside, everything is ready. It is only the problem with the main company. They want us to pay their subsidiary. We will only pay the company with whom we have entered into a memorandum of understanding,” Rijiju said.
The supercomputing system, built on Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000, is said to have a combined power capacity of 21.3 petaflops.
Supercomputer at IITM
The supercomputer at Pune-based IITM will provide 13 petaflops of computing power for atmospheric and climate research. According to a PTI report, 3,000 CPU nodes will be integrated using AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes will be integrated through NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system will leverage the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand network platform with on-network compute, 3PB flash memory, 29PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage, and high-tech Micron memory.
The current computing capacity at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops and at IITM is 4 petaflops, respectively.
